Email Word of the Day Service: Difficult Words?

[mattmns]

Do any of you use an email word of the day service?

I signed up for the Oxford English Dictionary wotd about a week ago, and I do not know if I signed up for the 10 year old one or what, but the words I have been getting are rather simple.

Anyone here know of a email word of the day service that has rather difficult, but commonly used, or useful, words?

Thanks.

 

[Gokul43201]

AWAD from wordsmith.org <highly recommend>

 

[dextercioby]

Yahoo has an option in the "my yahoo" package for "weird words in English language"...It's totally free...

Daniel.

EDIT:Folowing the same patternne weird word per day.

 

[Dooga Blackrazor]

I have 3, but I have a habit of not checking them. I'm approaching 200 unopened emails, but luckily I've been reading lately so I should be able to delete some of them without opening them.

I'm not sure of the URL but Arcamax has a decent one. I have WordSmith as well and Dictionary.com has one.

 

[dextercioby]

My Yahoo (yahoo actually) doesn't send any mail.You just click and open your personal "My Yahoo" page and scroll down the page...

Daniel.

 

[mattmns]

Thanks everyone. For the yahoo one, that is too much work I need the word to come to me, not for me to come to the word

 

[Knavish]

The dictionary.com wordlist is great. The words aren't too simple, yet absolutely archaic - I usually know about every other word. And it contains etymology too.

 

[Andromeda321]

My word of the day is provided by my English major roommate, who writes one daily upon our markerboard. She can find some interesting ones too that make you scratch your head (for example, "timothy" apparently means "grass" and such). Who needs email when you've got an English major?

 

[Moonbear]

Timothy is just a type of grass, it doesn't mean grass. It's great for hay.

 

[dextercioby]

Are u sure your roommate is not an "English major loser"??

*sorry*

Daniel.

 

[BobG]

Do any of you use an email word of the day service?

I signed up for the Oxford English Dictionary wotd about a week ago, and I do not know if I signed up for the 10 year old one or what, but the words I have been getting are rather simple.

Anyone here know of a email word of the day service that has rather difficult, but commonly used, or useful, words?

Thanks.

Training for your next game of Balderdash? It's actually more fun when no one knows the meaning of the words.

 

[mattmns]

Thanks for the responses, today I got words that I had no clue of what the meaning was :)

BobG, Balderdash?

 

[BobG]

Balderdash. It's a game of lies.

One person (the dealer?) draws a card with some incredibly obscure work on it, and each of the players writes a definition for the word. The 'dealer' reads all the definitions, including the correct one. Then the players guess which is the real definition.

You get a point for each person that guesses your definition is the correct one. You also get a couple points if you actually guess the correct definition. You also get points if the definition you wrote on your paper matches the correct definition (in other words, if you know the word, you get points). The person reading the definition only gets points if no one guesses the correct definition (tough talent there, being able to very subtly steer the other players from the correct definition by the way you read the definitions).

Then the 'deal' passes to the next player for the next round and repeat for however many rounds.

Tough game to play. You want to come up with something that everyone just wishes was the correct definition. But, if you get set into one style, everyone can pick you out as the author.

Doesn't do much to improve your vocabulary, though. Ask players a couple days later the definition of one of the words that came up in the game and they'll almost always give you the definition that got the most votes, not the correct definition.

 

[mattmns]

Sounds like an interesting game. May have to play it one time. One question. The dealer pulls out a random card, or chooses a card?

 

[BobG]

You draw the word at random. If you buy the game, it comes with plenty of very obscure words that almost no one born in the second half of the 20th century will have ever heard of.

 

[Gokul43201]

I used to play a version of Balderdash that did not require that I spend my lifetime's earnings on a board game. You simply grab the nearest 10 lb dictionary and turn to any page...

 

[BobG]

I used to play a version of Balderdash that did not require that I spend my lifetime's earnings on a board game. You simply grab the nearest 10 lb dictionary and turn to any page...

But isn't the 10 lb dictionary about 10 times more expensive than the board game?

How useful is a 10 lb dictionary anymore? About the only use for it I can think of is for when you're hiking out in the wilderness somewhere and don't have access to a computer. Except a 10 lb dictionary takes up so much room in your backpack that you don't have room for toilet paper.

On the other hand, a bad meal would be a good way to instigate a spontaneous game of balderdash.

 

[Gokul43201]

But isn't the 10 lb dictionary about 10 times more expensive than the board game?

Huh ? You don't have 10lb dictionaries in every other cranny of your home ?

<toc toc toc>These Americans are crazy !

 

[mattmns]

Today's word is cool. It is Misandry: Hatred of men. It also listed the word for hatred of women: Misogyny. Now I can say that I hate men, or women, and most people will have no clue what the hell I am talking about

 

[Moonbear]

Today's word is cool. It is Misandry: Hatred of men. It also listed the word for hatred of women: Misogyny. Now I can say that I hate men, or women, and most people will have no clue what the hell I am talking about

Except both are nouns, not verbs. The adjective form is pretty well-known among women: misogynistic. We're used to calling men that.

Who needs 10 lb dictionaries and words-of-the-day services when we had evil 7th and 8th grade English/reading teachers who made us memorize all those words for our vocabulary tests? I think I need to dig up my 7th grade teacher out of retirement to teach all you youngsters properly. We usually had 20 words a week to memorize (spelling, definition, and how to use it correctly in a sentence).

 

[mattmns]

I do not even remember taking English in 6th, 7th, or 8th grade. That could explain why I am so terrible at it. My 11th grade teacher made our class do vocabulary, but the words were quite useless. They were literary words like onomatopoeia, and sonata.

Also why could I not use nouns? Could I not say something like: Geeze Moonbear you are such a misandrist! ? Hmm, I do not know all those fancy words like noun, very, adjective, pronoun, so I probably modified it somehow.